We all have a gaming backlog. That's perfectly normal. It's like readers who have a shelf full of books they haven't read, or a knitter with ten unfinished projects hanging around. Some of us, though, lie about what's in our gaming backlog.I'm the kind of person who spends several hundred hours in a game before moving on. I get obsessed. There are games I still own that I've been playing off and on for almost a decade. Needless to say, my gaming backlog runs pretty deep, and a lot of those titles are ones that every other gamer in the world seems to have played.
6 The Last Of Us
The Last of Us has everything that everyone wants from their spare time: gratuitous violence, a heartbreaking storyline, and having to press a button and wait through an animation to pick up every single item.
The short version is that I didn't play the Last of Us because I didn't own a PlayStation 3. When I told people that, their reactions always came with a beautiful marriage of two emotions: frustration that I hadn't played the game and self-awareness that it was ridiculous to expect everyone to own a specific console.
Of course, these days, I probably wouldn't play it even if I did own the console. Have you seen the internet lately? You'd have thought that The Last Of Us Part II broke into every gamer's house to personally kill them with a two-by-four.
5 Half-Life
Half-Life is a game about a mute man named Gordon who follows the orders of an ominous balding man in a suit... for shits and giggles, I guess? Honestly, everything I know about Half-Life I learned from my partner, who's played them all through several times. I'm sure he won't be surprised to learn that I don't remember most of it.
Valve made video gaming history with Half-Life. Hell, just the joke about never getting Half-Life 3 is so pervasive in the gaming world that there's no way I could avoid them. Did I ever take the time to figure out what all the hype was about? Absolutely not.
I'm much happier knowing Gordon my own, twisted way: through memes online, my partner's ramblings, and the few hints we get in Valve's other popular series, Portal. I adored Portal.
4 Dark Souls
Which Dark Souls? Any Dark Souls.
And, yes, it is because they're too hard. I am fully prepared to handle the Twitter messages calling me a fake gamer. Bring it on.
And, no, I will not be playing Elden Ring. Nice try.
3
Most Of Final Fantasy
I love my four road-tripping himbos. Those are the main characters from Final Fantasy 15, the only Final Fantasy game I have ever played. I don't generally go in for turn-based combat. If you're a fan, you'll know that 15 was unusual in the franchise for not using turn-based combat. I enjoyed it for the plot and characters, imagine that.
Yet, even in Final Fantasy 15, the plot made no sense, the gender stereotypes were so thick I could cut them with an oversized cheese knife covered in gears for no reason Noctis' sword, and the gameplay of running around between story beats was less than enthralling.
Final Fantasy 7 recently got a remake. I won't be playing that. What I will be doing is lying to my coworkers about having played that. Sure hope they don't read this.
2 Red Dead Redemption
It's the horses, man. I just can't ride the horses.
1 The Witcher 3
When you meet another gamer, what's one of the first things you ask them? What kind of video games they play. My answer is that I really love roleplaying games, especially ones set in a fantasy setting. I'll tell them that I've enjoyed franchises like Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls.
The next words out of their mouth are always the same.
"Oh, you've gotta play The Witcher."
Problem is, I have no good response. There's no reason I shouldn't play the Witcher 3. I even own a copy for Xbox due to a mix-up with the disk and its case. The Witcher 3 is set in a fantasy world. It's got crafting mechanics. There are romance options, dialogue choices, and a little girl to get attached to who's actually secretly a princess or the last of her magical bloodline or... something.
This problem has only been amplified by the release of the Netflix show, which I have also never seen. Look, guys. I'm sure Henry Cavil is hot in it. I've seen Henry Cavil. That's not the point.
I just never felt pulled by The Witcher 3. It came out around the time of Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game I'd been waiting for for years, so I was buried way too deep into a romance plot with Blackwall to notice something else was going on. By the time I might have played it, a year or two later, there was nothing to grab my attention there.
It seemed like another middle-aged white, cis, heterosexual fantasy character with a gruff voice and a bad (or at least less-than-friendly) attitude. I've had more than enough of that for one lifetime, thanks.